In the municipality of Baiersbronn in Germany's
Black Forest, the country's best chefs have quietly been creating a culinary
wonderland that – while popular with Germans and Central European visitors –
remains relatively unknown to everyone else. This small region of just 200sqkm,
nine villages and 15,000 residents in the country’s southwest corner has the
highest number of Michelin stars per capita in the world, and more three-star
restaurants than anywhere else in Germany.

Located just 70km east of Strasbourg, France and
90km southwest of Stuttgart, Baiersbronn is home to two of Germany’s 10 three-star
restaurants: Bareiss, a restaurant in the hotel of the same name,
and Schwarzwaldstube, the flagship restaurant of the 200-year-old
Traube Tonbach Hotel. To compare, London also has two three-star
restaurants , while San Francisco has none.

One of these Michelin-starred
restaurants is located at
the 66-year old Hotel Bareiss, which started as a restaurant and
12-room hotel in 1947. Today, the restaurant is an intimate room with just eight
tables and 32 seats. Here chef Peter-Claus Lumpp serves elegant Black Forest
cuisine with an international twist – choose from such dishes such as braised
saddle of deer (from the hotel’s own hunting grounds) with spiced red cabbage
and sweet chestnuts, or foie gras with pears and Tasmanian pepper. In the
hotel’s more casual Dorfstuben restaurant, simply prepared local ingredients
take centre stage in dishes such as hand-made spaetzle, house-made pork
sausages, or even just a plate of beautifully crisp radishes accompanied by
quark, a creamy cheese.

But the restaurant that started it all is the Schwarzwaldstube
in the Traube Tonbach Hotel. Opened in 1789 as a bakery and restaurant, today
the 170-room Traube Tonbach is a member of the Relais and Chateaux luxury hotel group, and has
expanded to include a spa and fitness centre, a 25-person chapel, indoor and
outdoor pools, a wine bar and four restaurants. While the hotel and the surrounding
countryside have always been popular with spa visitors and hikers, the food of
the region had less appeal. It is the hotel’s flagship restaurant,
Schwarzwaldstube, which opened in 1977, that elevated the quality and
reputation of Baiersbronn cuisine to that of its neighbours just across the
border in Alsace, France.

The 35-seat Schwarzwaldstube has repeatedly been
rated as one of the top restaurants in the world (most recently in 2009 by the
British magazine, Restaurant), and holds 19.5 stars (out of 20)
from Gault Millau, a French restaurant guide similar to
Michelin. Four three-star chefs have trained in the restaurant’s kitchen, along
with chefs who together have earned more than 60 Michelin stars around the
world. According to the marketing manager, Julia Deleye, if you look in the
kitchen at any highly rated hotel restaurant in the world, you will likely find
someone who trained at Traube Tonbauch.

Those chefs would have trained with
chef Harald Wolfhart, who earned the restaurant its first Michelin star in 1992
and continues to oversee the kitchen today. Raised on a farm near the Black
Forest in the spa town of Baden-Baden, about 50km north of Baiersbronn, he said
he prefers products in their natural state, thanks to a childhood spent eating gathered
food. While he has been known to play around with form (he serves individually
sized versions of Black Forest gateau, drizzled with cherry liquor and topped
with a light cream foam) he said his food is not about show – it is about the
ingredients.

This philosophy is evident in Schwarzwaldstube’s
refined, French-influenced cuisine, including dishes such as foie gras with
artichokes, black truffle sauce and radishes and langoustine ravioli with
onions and truffles. It is also easy to see at the hotel’s other restaurants,
which Wolfhart oversees, like the German-focused Köhlerstube, or the seven-table Bauernstube, a cosy space decorated with
hand-carved cuckoo clocks, a large stone hearth and ceramic tiles that depict
traditional Black Forest scenes. Here the bounty of the region is served up in typical
dishes such as spaetzle (hand-formed
noodles) and maultaschen (a
meat-stuffed pocket of dough similar to ravioli).

According to Wolfart, the idea is to “put the
main product on throne. The product is king”. During cooking seminars hosted in the gleaming
stainless steel kitchen at Traube Tonbach, he stresses the importance of getting
the highest quality product at the best time, taking influence from nature and
eating what is local and fresh. “The most important products are the ones you
find when you walk out the door,” he said.

The hotel currently offers up to 52 seminars a year
in topics like Asian food or truffles and fish, pairing international ingredients
with local ones. Outside the classroom, guests can learn more about the foods
found in the Black Forest on a Schlemmerwanderung, or Feast Hiking Tour, led by chef Friedrich
Klumpp, from the Höferköpflestube
restaurant at the Hotel Rosengarten, located 5km from the Traube Tonbach. Along
the four-hour, 7km hikes that run from April to August, chef Klumpp points out
some of the ingredients that can be found in the Black Forest, such as
mushrooms, herbs, honey and berries. Guests then get to sample many of them in
snacks like sparkling wine or mineral water with elder blossom syrup; a baguette
topped with watercress curd; herb dumplings with creamed chanterelles; wild
herb salad with wild berry dressing; walnut bread with cranberry butter,
venison ham, fresh-picked olives and walnuts; and for dessert, foraged ground
ivy with chocolate, parfait from spruce tips and fresh blueberry
cake.

About 80% of the land around Baiersbronn is
forest, which provides fresh berries and herbs, mushrooms and wild game to both
professional chefs and home cooks. But the government wants to turn some of
that forestland into a national park, and many citizens are firmly against the
idea. As it is, there is not much land for growing food outside of the forest. The
land that is not covered in a canopy of tree so thick it blocks out the sun
(and confirms why the Black Forest was so named), is dotted with tiny
farmhouses belching woodsmoke from their chimneys, and small plots of land
where a few lone goats, pigs or cows graze.

Government control of the land would mean
locals will no longer have access to it as a source of food, a shift that could
significantly change the way people think about food in Baiersbronn. The matter
of the national park will be decided in October 2013, so it is not known yet
if, or how, the chefs and the people of the region will have to adapt in the
future. For now, the world-class cuisine of Baiersbronn remains inextricably
linked to the land and the particular ingredients available here, a bounty used
to create some of the best food in Germany, and even some
of the best food in the world.